Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said the world is doing just fine. It may not seem like it, but we are progressing.

Everybody calm down and look at the bigger picture.

Look at our modern world, he says in his new book, "Enlightenment Now." It's full of "newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world's knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket."

And Trump?

He's not the first leader to represent nihilism and authoritarianism, Pinker said. Believe it or not, he falls into an intellectual tradition that goes back to the counter-Enlightenment of the 19th century. And the world is always vulnerable to those kind of leaders, he said.

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"The intellectual roots of Trump may sound like a contradiction in terms," Pinker said, laughing. Trump comes from a class of "individuals who are subordinate to the glory of the tribe or nation. That we should look back to a Golden Age instead of advancing and continuing progress. That we should dismiss the finding of science when it's inconvenient to our ideological agenda. That we should retreat from cooperation on a global scale and revert to zero-sum competition between nations seeking glory."

It's opposition to the Enlightenment, the intellectual and philosophical movement of the 18th century, he said. Pinker will visit Boulder to sign and discuss "Enlightenment Now" at 7 p.m. Saturday at Unity Boulder Church in Boulder.

The highly researched and statistical book, more than 550 pages long, offers a glimpse into how humans are more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than ever before. He defends ideals with data. He points to the Enlightenment and offers a case for reason, science, humanism and progress, as the subtitle reads.

Pinker, who this month won a humanitarian award from Harvard, has penned 16 books. He combats pessimists in his latest. He may irk some thinkers and critics, but the book isn't jammed with academic jargon. It's not a highbrow intellectual diatribe. It's an intellectually undemanding read backed by more than 100 pages of footnotes, graphs and a slew of references.

In a phone interview, Pinker discussed journalism, big picture versus little picture, why math is important, advancements in society and why the world needs to stop painting such a dreary picture of itself, because it's fine.

Below are excerpts from the interview:

Daily Camera: You say that this book idea was conceived far before Donald Trump's presidency. An optimistic book in a perceivably hellish world, did your wheels turn faster to release the book so as to enlighten and uplift humanity?

Steven Pinker: If anything, it was delayed by the shock of Nov. 8. It kind of knocked me backward. I had to figure out how best to frame a story on human progress in light of what certainly seemed to be a significant threat to continuing progress ... I put the rise of Trump in the context of a long-standing conflict within the West between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment traditions.

DC: Humans can get caught up in their dystopian heads. But it's not easy to look at the big picture when we live in the little picture. Sure, a couple hundred years is a mere instant in evolutionary time, but how can we wrap our heads around moving past doom and gloom when that same blink of an eye is a lifetime for us?

SP: We don't easily savor slow and modern accomplishments. I think that we're hard-wired to worry about threats. There were always threats — there was no such thing as cumulation of medical knowledge that expanded lifetimes, the growth of technology that made life progressively more comfortable, the growth of markets that made the world progressively richer.

Some of the examples of progress that I document don't even unfold over centuries — but over decades, such as the decline of war deaths, decline of violent crimes, the decline of violence against women.

More generally there is a psychological phenomenon called the negativity bias that we dread losses more than we savor gains, we remember bad events more than good events. We are more discouraged by criticism than we're buoyed by praise. On the whole, we tend to worry about what can go wrong.

Together with the fact that we base our understanding of the world on images and anecdotes and narratives, a phenomenon called the availability bias. We estimate probability by racking our memories for examples. Not a valid way of judging probability, but that's the way the mind works. Given that the news will cover the things that go wrong — the wars, the terrorist attacks — then they will feed our mental algorithm that judges risk according to examples.

People will come away from the news that the world is getting worse, even if there are vast swaths of the world that are at peace and are improving. That never makes the news because the improvements don't happen suddenly or dramatically enough to become headlines.

DC: Obviously, as a journalist, I can't help but notice your comments about the mainstream media and how good news is under-reported.

SP: I want to avoid joining in the chorus of hacks on the mainstream media because mainstream media are a whole lot better than the alternative. Of course it is essential to report when things go wrong, but I think there is something of a bias with journalists to equate serious journalism with disasters and to frame events in the most dramatic and worst possible light.

DC: Do you have any thoughts on how the world can better get its information?

SP: When something conspicuously bad happens, we're told how often it happens and how often it happened in the past ... If a teen commits suicide, the generalization is that teen suicide is increasing. That's just a mathematical error. One point can't establish a trend either way.

There's unemployment now, but how bad was unemployment in the '80s? The 1970s? Journalists need to follow up on various crises and epidemics that turned out to be problems that got solved.

In journalism, the point is not to be optimistic, the point is to be accurate. As I try to establish in the book, not everything has been getting worse and worse. Quite the contrary. We are living longer, have less crime and less war. That must mean that the press is failing to report something ...

It's very clear that the picture of the world that we get from journalism is distorted. This is not a left-wing versus right-wing criticism. This is just a call to shift emphasis on daily events to longer-term trends, to not turn every setback or problem into a crisis or epidemic ...

I'm not alone. I got a number of these criticisms from journalists who themselves believe that there was a miscalibration in the from of coverage that advantaged, in particular, Donald Trump, who campaigned on a platform that the country was rapidly deteriorating. You can't walk to school without getting shot, the cities have no jobs and the kids aren't learning anything.

Paradoxically, his narrative was not only not countered, but somewhat encouraged by the left who agreed that the country is in a state of crisis and was not willing to defend any of the things that have gone right.

It's really not optimism. It's just evidence-based journalism. American homicide has gone from 10 deaths per 1,000,000 per year in 1992 to 4.7 in 20014.

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